


in soil, daisies grow

by mercuryhatter



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Buried Alive, Canon-Typical Violence, Claustrophobia, Gen, Identity, The coffin, buried avatar daisy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24064681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: instead of becoming temporarily cut off from the hunt during her time in the coffin, Daisy becomes of the Buried herself. as far as being monstrous goes, she likes this better.warnings for claustrophobia, rotting imagery, general scary mud.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 49





	in soil, daisies grow

**Author's Note:**

> germinate: 
> 
> 1\. to cause to sprout or develop.  
> 2\. to come into being; evolve.

The dirt inside the coffin was dry for the longest time, cracked and parched where it bent around Daisy’s limbs, jagged edges of tight-packed bricks tearing at her skin and drinking eagerly at the weak dribbles of blood that spilled. The dryness was almost a negative force, pulling any remaining moisture out of Daisy: her skin, her eyes, the membranes in her nose and mouth, desiccating her from every direction. All she could think of for that first interminable stretch of time was _water_ , water for her bleeding hands and broken lips and the dead-leaf rasp of her insides against each other. In the cage of her bones she was too aware of things she never wanted to be aware of, sandpaper liver scraping against dried-paper diaphragm, kidneys against intestines, muscles the texture of jerky twined through the whole mess. What little air she could get was part and parcel with dust and sand, gritted between her teeth, trailing down her throat, and she could never expand her lungs enough to cough it out.

Drawn and contorted across the layers of sediment, bent into agonies like a fossil no one cared enough about to string back together, Daisy closed her eyes against the dust. She couldn’t sleep-- every time she was near to unconsciousness, the rocks around her would shift in a way that made her heart stop from the fear that this was the shift that would snap her bones like droughted twigs-- but in the spaces between terrors she half-dreamt of water, of being eight years old tromping through spring rains in her bright yellow raincoat, bright blue boots splashing into puddles, tipping her face to the cool drops. 

She thought at first that it was one of these dreams that brought the first cool touches to her nose and cheeks until another wriggled down the back of her neck and still more began to embrace her arms and legs. She nearly screamed with relief as the soil began to shift around her, this time not sharp and threatening-- as the dirt mixed with the rain it softened and molded around her, allowing her to draw her limbs in close from the angles they had been forced into, even letting her ribs expand almost fully into the pliant mud around them. She found tears inside her for the first time since going into the coffin and they mixed with rain to make the mud even slicker around her face. Without thinking she opened her mouth, to laugh or sing or just smile she wasn’t sure. 

Mistake, mistake, believing this place could withhold pain even for a moment was an abominable mistake. Daisy didn’t want to scream as the mud slid eagerly down her throat, knew that it would only draw it in deeper, but she couldn’t stop herself. She howled into the torrent of mud and it took the opening before she could take in another breath, thick and heavy in her throat and nose. She could feel the sodden weight of it pushing down into her lungs, into her stomach, felt like it was settling into her very bones. The rain wasn’t a reprieve at all, only a chance for the Buried to mold her into itself even deeper, to curl around her like a lover in summer, too hot, too close. And she’d been held immobile for so long that her thrashes against it were too weak to be more than spastic twitches, aborted flailings that only added exhaustion to the weights that bore down on her. But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t simply lay still and allow herself to be filled with cement like a mold, was terrified of what could happen if she dried out again like this. How could her body take it? How had she not died already? 

If the first dry phase had been weeks, then the rain only lasted minutes, but Daisy’s fight against it lasted days. Slowly, over hours, she was able to force her hands near her face, pushing past the bird-boned cracks of her fingers and the splits and bends of her fingernails as the mud pushed itself beneath them too. She clawed the mud away from her mouth, so slowly, falling limp with exhaustion more than once, each time she started up again harder and harder with nothing in the barren soil to replenish her, but she cleared _just_ enough of a space that, over the days that followed, she could hack up _just_ enough of the mud inside her, to find some space in her lungs again. They still felt heavy and wet inside her, moving not with the evenness that breath should have but in pained flutters, but any inch of air was worth it. Cough, retch, clear the mud with her hands, breathe, repeat. It was something to do, at least, something to work towards-- almost tolerable, almost progress. Until the rain came again. 

The soil around her was never again as dry as it had been for that first stretch of time. Instead of pinned like a butterfly Daisy was drowning now, always drowning, heavy and sodden. If she could see in the everpresent dark here she wouldn’t have been surprised to see her skin begin to mildew, thought sometimes when there was enough space in her mouth to feel her tongue that it might be furred with mold, wondered if one day she would spill mycelia from her belly, winding up her throat and out towards a sky she could barely remember. 

The terror wasn’t intermittent the way it had been at first; there were no more half-dreams for Daisy as her limbs twisted like rotten roots into the mud around her. It was constant now, variable only in whether she chose to try to scream, not enough air now for it to emerge as more than a dirt-choked gurgle, or whether she chose to bear it quietly. She felt wrung out in every slowly compacting bone, every cramped and spasming muscle, exhausted beyond imagining. Even her thoughts staggered in stumbling circuits around her mind, forced slowly through thick folds of tissue. Never more than half formed, just as her lungs were never more than half empty. 

But there was something else to be noticed in the immense pressures of the earth and the fear: as the visegrip ticked closed by millimeters, something else was being pressed out of Daisy. She felt it leaking out of her like orange-flesh, the ragged pulp of it trailing from her rotting-rind of skin and bone. As her legs atrophied past even the memory of running, her arms past the faintest thought of reaching, her hands splintered into crushed-up masses of twitching flesh that wouldn’t know what to do with a gun if it bloomed from between them, Daisy felt the chase being pushed somewhere deeper than she was. Or possibly pushed up towards the distant surface, like the Buried was a body pushing out a splinter, and the splinter was that shard inside Daisy that drove her to pursue, to see herself as an endless maw and anyone before it as prey. Here, her teeth were ground down and cracked on the rocks, senses she had used to track a fearful, running thing replaced with the quiet dark of the dirt. As the earth turned around her, it rubbed her sharp edges down like a river rock, like a new lump of coal. The frantic fluttering inside her grew still with it. The heaviness turned to an odd, persistent kind of calm. Even the fear was beginning to rot and erode, softening into something else. 

Daisy did not fight or dig or try to breathe anymore. The terror in her ballast-stone heart, once sand, was well on its way to becoming stone, and Daisy curled around it like a sun. She began to remember again, spring rains and skipping stones and the curl of new sprouts on wet dirt. 

The scar on her back was warm now. Not like sunlight; like the breath of earth from a hot, open fissure in a mine shaft. She settled into that, too, remembering being a person, remembering having a name. Naming herself. 

The thought made her smile, lips stretching against the grit that lay flush with them. The knowledge of self she thought she lost echoing in and around her, moving with gentle vibration through the dirt until it came back to her, dressed in a familiar voice--

“Daisy? _Daisy!_ ” 

With a great shifting of rocks and earth, Daisy found, to her own distant surprise, that she could respond.

“Jon?”


End file.
